Enrichment

The Cross Rail Project

Geoff Riley

22nd September 2014

  1. Infrastructure has gone from the loss account to the profit account in British politics in recent years
  2. Increasing recognition that the skills, expertise, capabilities brought to bear in delivering major projects will help to support the regeneration of high value-added manufacturing in the UK
  3. There is now a much deeper understanding of the links between modern infrastructure and global competitiveness
  4. HS1 was built twenty years ago - giving a fast Channel Tunnel link through the South - £4.7bn
  5. Heathrow Terminal 5 £4.3bn
  6. London 2012 including the Olympic Park - £8bn
  7. CrossRail £14.8bn (currently on time and under budget)

All part of the National Infrastructure Plan which contains 40 priority projects with more than £370bn of work in the pipeline

  • London will have an extra one million people living in the city in ten years time
  • Cross Rail services scheduled for full operation in the Spring of 2019

Cross Rail provides

  • 10% extra capacity for London
  • 24 trains per hour, 200 extra journeys enabled each year - extra capacity is built into the design
  • £42bn of economic growth over the life-cycle
  • 3million square feet of property being developed
  • Relief of pressure on other underground lines such as Central Line will increase their ability to handle traffic within capacity by an extra twenty years

Funding - Who pays? Who benefits?

  • TFL (Transport for London) is providing £7bn and central government is giving around £5bn.
  • 60% of Cross Rail is being paid for by Londoners including the extra 2p in the £ business rate over the next 16 years
  • BAA plc and City of London also significant contributors as well as some property developers

Wider Economic and Environmental Gains

  1. Reduction in train noise
  2. Improved station energy consumption
  3. Nature reserves created, more than 3120m spent creating neighbourhoods in and around new CrossRail stations
  4. Lightweight trains using regenerative braking
  5. New spaces for artists, new theatres and community spaces
  6. 55,000 jobs supported directly by the project
  7. Enough new housing development to fill 16 Shards
  8. More than 400 apprentices

CrossRail is now the 5th biggest property company in the UK - an output of building smart infrastructure

Progress - Scale and Complexity - some quotes from the talk

"CrossRail has set new standards and new benchmarks for how major infrastructural projects will be completed in the future"

83% of tunnels already constructed, over 36km

Each of the assets in the project has a minimum of 30 years active use in the life cycle

CrossRail has completely mapped the underground of London using more than 450 digital maps - it took two years to understand what is under the city!

The human capital involved in the project is vast - the starkest manifestation of the importance of know-how in building and sustaining competitiveness

The length of the project covers a geographical area where the variance of wealth is extremely high - Cross Rail focused on heightening the social and economic returns for eastern London

HS2 - £15bn to double capacity on the north-south route - in 20 years time we will laugh at ourselves if we have not spent the money on developing this incremental capacity through the HS2 project. China is building the equivalent of 4 HS2 projects every year.

Geoff Riley

Geoff Riley FRSA has been teaching Economics for over thirty years. He has over twenty years experience as Head of Economics at leading schools. He writes extensively and is a contributor and presenter on CPD conferences in the UK and overseas.

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